How to set Unrealistic to Realistic Goals in Life? | By Sawan Kumar

Most people don’t have unrealistic goals. They have realistic goals attached to completely unrealistic timelines. I say this in almost every workshop I run in Dubai, and it stops people mid-sentence. Over five years coaching AI consultants, real estate agents, and online entrepreneurs, I’ve watched the same pattern repeat: someone wants to earn AED 50,000 a month within 60 days of starting, or close 10 property deals in their first month. The goal itself isn’t the problem. The missing steps between today and the finish line are.A goal becomes unrealistic when it ignores three things: your current baseline, the number of steps required to close the gap, and an honest count of the resources you actually have. Not the resources you plan to acquire along the way — the ones you have right now. I once worked with a real estate agent in Dubai who set a target of 10 deals in month one. She had zero UAE contacts, no CRM, and was still reading through contracts. We didn’t scrap the goal. We inserted the missing steps: 2 deals in month three, with a proper pipeline in GoHighLevel and a follow-up sequence built out. She hit 12 deals by month six. The goal stayed. The timeline became honest.The shift from unrealistic to realistic is not about thinking smaller. It’s about backward planning — starting at the destination and mapping every step back to today. When I teach this in my courses, I ask students to write their big goal at the top, then work backward: what has to be true one month before the deadline? One month before that? By the time they connect the chain to this week’s first action, a “90-day goal” often becomes a 6-month goal. That’s not failure. That’s accuracy.I’ve seen what happens when people skip this work. A property trainer I coached set a target of launching four online courses in one year while running a full-time agency. By month three he had burned out and finished nothing. We reset to one course, built it in eight weeks using AI tools for scripting and Canva for slides, and launched to his existing email list. It earned him AED 18,000 in the first week. One goal done properly beats four goals done badly, every time.Setting realistic goals is a skill, not a personality trait. The clients I see grow fastest are not the most talented — they are the ones who review their targets weekly, adjust without embarrassment, and keep showing up. If your current goals feel either too safe or completely out of reach, that is the signal to do the mapping exercise. Start with where you actually are, not where you wish you were.